La piedra Rosetta del teatro comercial europeo: El Teatro Cervantes de Alcalá de Henares by John Jay Allen (review)

This book is the latest contribution by John Jay Allen to our knowledge of the material conditions of Golden Age theater, a field in which he is the undisputed living expert and the importance of which it would be difficult to overestimate. Here Allen tells three stories. The first is about the discovery of a 1601 corral under the superimposed layers of an eighteenthcentury coliseum, a nineteenth-century romantic theater, and a twentieth-century movie house, plus the effort by the three students who made the discovery to reconstruct it, with the assistance and direction of John Varey. The second is about the construction and structure of the corral, built by Francisco Sánchez, an illiterate carpenter, following the Corral de la Cruz, which he had seen in Madrid. The third reiterates Allen’s previous work on the layout of corrales, with particular emphasis on their relationship to adjoining houses, and how this affected the staging of individual comedias such as La vida sueño, and Fuenteovejuna.

The first story is a saga with a sad ending. The struggles of the devoted students and John Varey, opposed or ignored by uncaring bureaucrats and ambitious politicians, were long and tortuous, in spite of the support of the international and national community of experts on Golden Age theater. After decades of disheartening failures the corral was restored, but not before the death of Varey, who never saw his labors come to fruition, nor was his personal library, which he had donated to the project, preserved at the site. The library ultimately was dispersed and lost, yet the theater is there, with its three incarnations restored, available for Spanish and foreign companies to stage classical and modern plays.

Sánchez’s construction of the corral is crucial, because this is the only remaining vestige of a historical Golden Age theater, and its rebuilding is a unique process on a European scale. Shakespeare’s Globe in London burned down, as we know, so what we have is a replica built on the site following documents of the period. The stones on the patio of the corral in Alcalá are the same ones on which Cervantes reports to have stood; hence, “Rosetta Stone” in the title of the book. The carpenter—whose illiteracy I question, for how could he have taken and preserved measurements?—followed the basic plan of the Madrid corrales, with the aposentos, cazuela, basic stage, bleachers on the side, patio for the mosqueteros, and, most importantly, ways to collect money from the spectators. The Cervantes was not funded by a hospital or welfare institutions; it was a commercial theater.

Allen makes much of the aposentos, the windows on the walls of adjacent houses that served as box seats for the well-to-do. This configuration established a complicated social and monetary relationship between the theater and the community and played a significant role in the placement of the audience around the stage, as well. How could the producer, autor, charge spectators for the use of these, and how was access to them arranged? Allen argues that the aposentos were integrated into the corral. This discussion leads to detailed calculations of how the monetary contribution of the vulgo compared to that of the rich, in order to test the material validity of Lope’s assertion that he wrote for the people because they paid to support his work (Cervantes says the same, but as a critique). Allen agrees with Lope: the vulgo’s share is more significant, which also explains Lope’s pandering to the humble in plays such as Fuenteovejuna and Peribáñez. We know that there is more to it than that, of course, but this is valuable information.

Allen returns in the last part of the book to his magnificent observations about how the architectural features of a corral determined stagecraft and how this affected the actual performance of...